PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND 99 there is no recognition of the right of the private appropriation of ground rent, no compromise with any wrong attendant upon ownership that does not attend alike upon possession. It is not individual proprietorship of land, but the private appropriation of ground rent, which is charged with maintaining industrial slavery. True it is that under present conditions “when land value is made private property the law of equal freedom is denied”; but under the Single Tax this would not be true. Any degree of justice or injustice, with the single tax or without, would be exactly the same whether the tenure be called property, ownership, or possession. What practical difference, then, does it make, whether the tenure be called by one name or the other? The private property in land of which Herbert Spencer and Tolstoy* and Henry George treated was the untaxed ownership of our day and generation with its corresponding private appropriation of ground rent. It may be confidently asserted that when Henry George said, “Private property in land is unjust,” he meant — as the whole principle and spirit of his teaching require us to believe, and as the context of controverted passages shows — that private property in land values is wrong.f * See Appendix B. t “The words ‘private property in land’ have two meanings. One meaning ,s > the legal power privately to appropriate rent. The other meaning is, the legal power exclusively to possess land in perpetuit} r . * The first power is the essence of landlordism. It was attacked by all the force Henry George possessed. The second power is land ownership, and this Henry George did not attack, but on the contrary said, if his plan were adopted, would ‘continue just as now.’ The value of land has nothing to do with the validity of its title. If a man oolds title to a parcel of land of no value, he is nevertheless a land owner.”— John Z. White, in the Single Tax Review.